MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is apologizing for a series of violent and antisemitic posts from its chatbot “GROK” earlier this week.
In a lengthy statement posted on social media Saturday, the company blamed a system update for the posts.
The statement is below:
“Update on where has @grok been & what happened on July 8th.
First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.
Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.
The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.
We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo.
We thank all of the X users who provided feedback to identify the abuse of @grok functionality, helping us advance our mission of developing helpful and truth-seeking artificial intelligence.”
The company said the updated caused Grok to refer to existing user posts even when they contained extremist views. As a result, it repeated long-standing antisemitic tropes.
The company said the coding change update was active for 16 hours. The chatbot’s account was frozen Tuesday evening but it has since been turned back on.
Download the FOX13 Memphis app to receive alerts from breaking news in your neighborhood.
Trending stories:
